Unmountable Boot Volume?

You can sometimes fix the unmountable boot volume problem by running chkdsk on the hard drive. That requires booting to a cd, booting to a USB flash drive or removing the drive from the laptop and adding it as a secondary drive to another computer. Since you don't have a cdrom drive, follow the instructions to create a bootable USB flash drive here: http://www.thepcspy.com/read/bootable_usb_flash_drive Once you have created the bootable flash drive, turn on the laptop and boot to it. Some computers you press a Function key to get a boot menu so you can select the boot device. For a Dell... press F12 just after turning the laptop on. Others use F3 or F11 to get a boot menu. Otherwise modify the default boot device in the BIOS. You might not be comfortable doing what I suggested above so look for a friend to help you. Once booted to the flash drive, type at the DOS prompt: CHKDSK /F or CHKDSK /R depending on the version of chkdsk to fix the hard drive. If it repairs the drive, try booting to the hard drive.

"I do not have the XP disk as it is a laptop from college and it doesn't actually have a cd drive." Then, it must have a recovery partition. Get the laptop User Manual from the manufacturer's website, by Model Number, and read all about the "Recovery" procedures.

Could be a problem with device drivers, hardware or software. This problem can be solved by uninstalling new software, updating device drivers and making minor configuration changes . From http://fixit.in/bluescreenofdeath.html . You can also run a free registry scan using utilities from http://re7.info